Building Indorse — Background, Token Sale & Future

It was just another day when Gaurang, (the CTO of Indorse) called me somewhere in the beginning of 2016 to talk about a startup he co-founded. He told me about the new type of service that they were building— Smart Contracts as a Service & they had been accepted into an accelerator program. The name of the startup was Attores.

I’ve been friends with Gaurang for almost 10 years. We went to the same University for our Engineering courses. After completing Engineering, we had lost touch & hardly had any idea of what each other was doing. We reconnected through a common friend & found out that we both were in the tech space working on different products. We started bouncing ideas off each other. It was early 2015 & Ethereum had started getting some exposure.

One day, Gaurang mentioned that he was looking at creating an Ether Mining Calculator. As the name suggests, the calculator would give you an idea of how much Ether you can mine according to the resources you have. He started working to implement that, but when he did some research, he found out that there were better services for this & creating just another calculator wouldn’t create much value. We scrapped that idea off.

Days went by, we worked together on some interesting FinTech projects (I was freelancing back then), created and marketed products, but there was something missing. Impact! With our work, however good it may have been, we weren’t able to create an impact. We knew our stuff pretty well, we worked hard (and smart at times), but we weren’t able to create tremendous value for people.

We always strived to create something that potentially could change a billion lives!

Coming back to Attores, when Gaurang told me about the service offering, I knew this idea had great potential. I had a chat with David (CEO & co-founder of Attores/Indorse — really an awesome guy) the next day & I decided to start working with them on Attores — in communications & marketing.

At Attores, an idea that struck us well was to offer digital certificates on blockchain. We landed a project with Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore, where Attores is located. For the Polytechnic, we place diplomas on a private ethereum blockchain and help the students push their e-certificates to professional networks like LinkedIn.

We soon realized that there was something fundamentally broken with the current model of systems for professionals. Specifically, professionals looking to publish their skills which are certified by trusted institutions (which we were working with), but additionally non-accredited or independently acquired skills such as coding outside of a classroom.

The current professional endorsement systems on other platforms don’t make sense. Anyone can endorse anyone for anything, at times without knowing whether the person really has those skills or not.

This needed to be fixed.

We’re living in a professional world where qualifications are representations of skills acquired. While your education & the institution you went to still matters, it’s your skills that you acquire along the way that play a greater role in your growth trajectory.

Another problem that everyone of us who uses social media faces is the ownership of data. Your data on these platforms is owned by the platforms you post it to & they monetise. Bad news — you aren’t getting anything out of it, nor from the value of the network as it grows.

We now had a fair idea of the platform & what it could offer. But, for this to work, we needed a network effect. With blockchain, we saw a unique opportunity to tap on the existing blockchain communities in order to create a network to begin with and incentivize the supporters themselves to use it.

There we had it. The dots started connecting together. We had a problem that we could fix using our expertise in blockchain, that could have an impact on billions of lives and benefit everyone in the ecosystem. David, Gaurang, Dipesh (our Operations Head) & I started working on this in March 2017 and it’s been a heck of a ride.

We were able to achieve a lot of things since then:

• David & Gaurang wrote the first draft of the whitepaper over a week in April with the help of Brian, who is now studying law at Oxford. It’s been seven iterations of the whitepaper since then.
• S$100k seed round from Coinsilium in May-June
• 12k newsletter subscribers
• 4.3k slack members — we had stopped slack invites a month ago because of spammers
• 5.4k twitter followers, 6.2k FB followers
• Presented Indorse at 14 meetups & 9 conferences in 7 countries
• Received $9m in token sales from 1871 different accounts (actually $11m in total but $2m worth of Ether had to go back to the Chinese contributors through ICOAge)
• Team strength — we’re soon to be 10 members team working on Indorse
• Partnerships with Change Finance, Bitjob & Gimli — More partnerships in the pipeline and in discussions.
• Indorse POC out — Received feedback from Advisors & first set of testers. New batch of testers trying out the app as I’m writing this.
• Exchanges — Gatecoin, YoBit, Coss, HitBTC, Liqui.io

And, this is just the beginning. :)

Why we did the Token Sale

• A platform needs network effects to succeed — we need tokens in the hands (or in wallets) of as many people as possible. At the end of the token sale, we had 1871 different accounts holding IND tokens.
• Building the ecosystem
  We see our platform inspiring a variety of use cases and integrations, leading to a flourishing ecosystem that adds value to our members having IND token at the core.
• Development
  Research and development will involve the building of the technology. This includes: the Token App, smart contract systems, publishing system, claim voting system, advertising system, and the other relevant components.
• Building a great team
  We need a great team to build a great product. The majority of our reserves will be used for hiring great people & building a solid team.
  “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” — H.E. Luccock
• Marketing
  Marketing spending will be used for bringing in new members into the platform, developing partnerships, and bringing in advertising to the platform.
• Operations & legal
  Operational costs such as office rental, accounting, and other day to day operational needs are covered here. Operational costs also include code reviews and security audits. Also, we think it’s a prudent idea to hold a portion of funds for any potential legal issues that may arise.

Importance of IND tokens

IND is the main utility token of the platform.

• Advertising
  The most direct use of the data collected on the platform is for targeted advertising. This includes the persons viewing the profiles and the profile creators themselves. Profile creators will be able to opt-out if they do not wish to share their data, however staying in will allow them to receive rewards in the form of Indorse Rewards.
• As the IND token will be the payment method for buying advertising space on the platform, advertisers will need to purchase IND tokens through an exchange in order to avail of advertising units on the platform.
• Rewards in the form of tokens
  The members on the platform will be rewarded for their activities in the form of IND tokens.

After the Token Sale — what the future looks like!

Indorse is now a new ecosystem in itself. While it’s somehow satisfying to see how far we’ve come, it’s more challenging down the road & we couldn’t have been prepared better.

Timeline for our Product:

• End Nov 2017/ Beginning Dec 2017 — first release on the mainnet, a CV visualizer, main profile page. Target — Crypto community
• End Jan 2017/ Beginning Feb 2018 — second release on the mainnet, changes according to the feedback, creative use cases. Target — wider community beyond crypto space
• Mid 2018 — third release, validation of skills, incentivising for skills validation. Target — wider community
  Check out this post for detailed product outline, written by our CTO Gaurang: https://blog.indorse.io/indorse-product-update-2-october-2017-864a0b96d3e8
• Marketing & Business Development
  We’ve aligned our marketing and business development plan in accordance with the development of the product. While we make sure we get proper exposure for the initial growth, we’re very careful of how we spend our funds on marketing and ads.
• Currently we’re focusing on partnerships, meetups / conferences (that’s how we get enthusiastic early adopters & exposure) & right combination of PR + ads. We’ll accelerate more once we open the public alpha where anyone can sign up & get active on Indorse.

Indorse Culture

We’re a strong team with members coming from various backgrounds tied to a common mission. We’re making sure that we create a great environment where talent could thrive & people always have the space to grow.

Our values:

• Strive to make people’s lives easier
• Communication
  Communicate more, communicate often! Be clear & concise.
• Transparency
  We try to be as transparent as possible. We write Development & company updates regularly which include things right from hiring, product updates & other updates. We share the important info as soon as solidified so community is in the know.
• Autonomy & ownership
  You take ownership of your domain / tasks & communicate well so other team members are aware of it.
• No ego — Stay Humble
• Be adaptable
  Things change fast & you adapt yourself accordingly.
• Have fun!

P.S. — If you think what we’re doing is interesting & you can connect with our mission, join us. All we care about is your skills and whether you strive to make a difference. That is that. We’re just 6 months into building this company & we have a long way to go. We’re into this for a long haul & look for people who can commit to the cause.

Current positions we are looking for: UX/UI, Node.js, React, Ethereum Smart Contract Developers. Please feel free to drop us a mail at info@indorse.io should you be interested or would be aware of anyone who should be a good fit for us.